


The Highest Price

by goldleaf1066



Category: The Dark Crystal (1982), The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (TV)
Genre: Brea POV, Deet (cameo), Grah/Goh (implied), Grief, Hair Braiding, Hup (cameo), Other, Rian (cameo), heart to heart, skeksis/mystic/urskek lore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-15
Updated: 2019-12-15
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:41:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21809698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldleaf1066/pseuds/goldleaf1066
Summary: The quest is not complete, and the journey ahead still paved with painful uncertainties not even a puppet show can prepare for.As night falls over the Circle of the Suns, a grieving Brea still has questions.
Relationships: skekGra/urGoh (Dark Crystal)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 74





	The Highest Price

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in a couple of days and loved every minute of it. I also think the gang would have benefitted from at least one night hanging in the CotS. This is sort of an interpretation of that, but with plot (I hope).
> 
> This story, of course, will make absolutely zero sense if you've not seen episode 7.
> 
> Any mistakes are my own.

“Leave? _Now_? Oh, no no. The suns have set. _Far_ too dangerous.”

“But you _just said_ we have to find the-“

“Out… of the question.”

“Shifting sands would swallow even the bravest gelflings, yes.”

“… and… podling-friends.”

“The Crystal Desert is _no_ place to travel at night. Even the Dousan make camp once the stars come out.”

“Maybe the _Dousan_ have never been on a quest as important as-“

“The _Dousan_ know the desert better than you, princess.”

“Only… certain…-“

“ _Death!_ ”

“-… death… awaits you in the night dunes. Better… to rest… here.”

“I concur with myself. I have to, and must, and _do_ insist on it.”

“And do _you_ insist?” Brea turns to the other, braids whirling.

“Did you not… understand… what you have been shown?” The Wanderer’s look is of puzzlement, and he glances up at the Heretic with the air of a healer whose patient has vastly misunderstood a prognosis and isn’t quite sure how to rephrase the obvious.

The Heretic shakes his head almost imperceptibly. _Don’t bother._

Brea closes her eyes, the breath she takes deep and scented with spices, incense and the cooling night air. “Well, then, we will rest here tonight. But we _must_ be on our way at first light.”

“Of course,” says the Heretic. He looks pointedly into the hanging garden, where sleeping spaces have been made for them. “Best get settled in. It’s a long walk to Grot.”

*

“I mean, we _can_ just leave. What are they going to do?” Rian asks her when she skulks back between the leaves and sits down on her blanket with a sigh. Her feet hurt, her head, her heart.

“Not give us directions, for one. Or food, or water, or-“

“I’m sure they wouldn’t do that,” says Deet, already in bed. “They’ve been very kind to us so far.”

“Yes, that puppet show was so very generous.”

“But we learned so much! And it was beautiful!”

“And unnecessary. And long. And _weird_.”

“Lets… just try to sleep,” says Brea. “We have a long journey again tomorrow.” Hup is already snoring, and weariness is rising through her inch by inch. Frustration too; there is so much at stake, and here she is, the answers she seeks dangled in front of her nose before being sent to bed with a scolding.

It is something her mother would do.

Would have done.

*

The night moves on, and the lanterns burn out one by one. Brea lies awake, her thoughts a calamity of questions and fears and a great wave of sadness that crashes down over her again and again. So much has happened in one day. So much yet to happen.

She tries to distract herself by remembering the stories she read as a childling. It’s been many trine since she even thought about them, the unexpected appearance of the Wanderer ambling down the ramp toward their little party jogging her memory of pouring over old books purloined from the library, the ones with illustrations; bright paintings of gelflings in finery and shining swords, of creatures of Thra, of the cosmological phenomena, and a very old book with faded writing and ghostly drawings so faint they had almost been invisible; a book of long-haired and long-faced wizards, healers, alchemists, oracles. Reclusive, hidden, and very old. 

Her mother would tell her stories before bed, she, Brea, sitting in her lap, book open in her hands as Mayrin read over her shoulder and braided her hair. The lanterns would burn low then too, and there was always one more story, one more page, _please_.

She didn’t know then if any of it was true, or if the mystics were more than just a bedtime tale. Her mother had never elaborated on them; either she didn’t know or care, or it was too late and time for dreams. More tomorrow, I promise. But she never continued that story. Brea doesn’t know any more now even after meeting the Wanderer.

Turning the page after her mother had kissed her goodnight and reading tales of Mystics stealing the souls of gelflings that wandered into the wrong parts of the forest, of cutting off their wings or their hair to use in potions, of singing them to sleep, never to reawaken. 

Lying awake seems to have no purpose; she can hear voices, hushed but strange. She sits up, and listens. It’s the skeksis and the mystic, of course. They’re… _bickering_. She supposes that if she really wants to know truth from tale she only needs to ask and judge for herself. The Wanderer’s part in their opera had certainly not felt particularly enchanting.

When she emerges from the garden, they are nowhere to be seen. She looks around, her gaze catching on gently swinging chimes, coloured stones, scrolls and pots and herbs and chisels and hammers and nails. Had they ever tried to pry the one from the Heretic’s head? Maybe it was what made him sane, or maybe his madness was what would save them all.

A light from above catches her eye; up in the curtained nook from which the Wanderer had appeared earlier is a soft glow of a hidden lamp and the sound of voices trying to be quiet and failing completely, their stage whispers seething through the air and right into Brea’s twitching ears.

“You’re… doing it wrong.”

“I’m doing it the way I always do it.”

“…that’s what… I said.”

The wooden ramp creaks quietly as Brea steps onto it, and she pauses. What if she’s about to interrupt some private moment, a secret discussion or worse, some dark plot to snuff them out in their sleep? Would she pull back the hanging fabrics to find a blade pointed at her throat? Would she be cut down like her mother, fooled again by the skeksis’ honeyed words and the unfamiliar but beguiling sham of the Wanderer’s gentleness?

The decision to proceed is made for her. Halfway up her foot catches on an uneven board and she manages not to stumble, but it’s too late to back away now. 

“Come in, if you’re coming.” The Heretic’s voice doesn’t sound as if he’s scheming her demise, merely amused, and resigned, as if he knew she would come find them.

They don’t even look at her when she slips between the curtains. The Wanderer’s nose is pointed toward his companion, watching what he’s doing with his hands. Great whorls of fragrant smoke billow from his nostrils and Brea tries not to cough.

“If you’ve come… to further protest… our decision,’ he begins, but Brea takes a step forward and lifts her hands in peace-offering.

“No,” she says, “No, I-,” she is distracted, trying to work out what the skeksis is doing through the clouds of smoke. They are sitting beside one another on scattered cushions, the hanging charms suspended from the beams above them clinking softly as they tap against the skeksis’ head and the wood-and-bones configuration he carries on his back. With a small twist of horror in her stomach Brea notices a second pair of arms, much smaller than the Wanderer’s, atrophied, tied together in all the wrong angles against his shoulders. One being, split into two, with all the good in one and all that is wrong in another. 

Or so it would seem. The smoke clears, and she can see now that the Wanderer’s tail is in the Heretic’s lap, and he’s brushing through the wispy tuft on the end with a small carved comb.

“You…?” prompts the Heretic, tugging roughly at a knot. The Wanderer jerks his head up and frowns at him. 

“I’m not going… to let you… keep doing this,” he says, so ponderously that all huffiness is quite dissipated by the time he’s finished, “if you keep doing it… like this.” 

“Who’s going to do it for you? Hmm? If it really hurt I’d know about it.” Tug, tug, tug. “Anyway, I need this,” the Heretic says, holding up the comb for Brea’s benefit, “for my gelfling.”

Brea tilts her head in confusion, then it dawns on her. The teeth of the comb are full of the silvery strands of the Wanderer’s hair. Just the right amount to add to a puppet’s head, braided and pinned just so.

“Why don’t you make… another mystic?” says the Wanderer, still put out. He moves his tail from the Heretic’s lap, curling it around his leg.

“ _You_ are all I need” The Heretic cocks his head, and it seems he is forgiven. The Wanderer allows him to pull his tail tip back into his lap to begin anew.

“I wanted to know more about you,” Brea says, and they both look up at her simultaneously as if having momentarily forgotten she was there. She moves closer, sits cross-legged on a cushion the Wanderer pushes toward her with one of his many hands. “I had heard stories, but I don’t remember them too well. They didn’t always paint you in a very good light.”

“Well, I can _certainly_ set the record strai-“

“Actually, I was speaking to the Wanderer,” Brea clarifies, sheepish. The Heretic throws her an affronted expression, but that is little different from his normal one. The Wanderer looks surprised. Perhaps from what few visitors they must have, the occasional caravan perhaps, no-one ever gets past the Heretic’s personality in order to find out what parts of the one they used to share he got.

“What… does the gelfling princess… want to know?”

“Brea,” she says. “Please, just call me Brea.” Princess, daughter of the All-Maudra, except the All-Maudra is no longer her mother. It is still a shadow behind her, a darkness in the shape of Mayrin falling as the General’s sword butter-knifes through her. And Seladon, clever, catty Seladon’s words spat at her.

_Your fault._

“Brea,” says the Wanderer as carefully as an incantation. He nods at her. “You should call me… urGoh. I do not… wander… so much any more.”

“Only in here!” says the Heretic, tapping a finger against the side of his head with a knowing look.

“Thank you, urGoh” she says, and now she can’t think of her question, or the stories, only of her mother lying there on the throne-room floor, her life spreading out in a pool all around her. Kneeling beside her in the warmth and wet and screaming until they dragged her away, her voice raw.

They wait for her to start. The hair of the Wanderer’s tail-tip is smoothing out, and Brea watches as the Heretic, for all his objections, is taking more care in detangling it, starting from the ends and gently working his way up. She notices one of the Wanderer’s hands resting on the Heretic’s robed knee as he works, thumb absently drawing patterns against the cloth. 

“I didn’t know for sure that the mystics were anything more than a story until today. I only half-remember tales I read as a childling. They said you were spell-casters, soothsayers. Stargazers,” she adds, looking not to the sky but at her feet, the fraying edge of the cushion, her thumb-nail. 

“That is… somewhat… accurate.”

“But you’ve been kind to us,” she goes on, looking up. “The stories said you would lure lost gelfling into traps, enchant them, make them forget all their words. You’ve not done anything like that, and I don’t think you’re setting a trap.” She feels the tears stinging her eyes again, or maybe it’s the smoke, or weariness at last nipping at her heels. “My mother was murdered today, by the skeksis lords. I need someone to be kind and not because they want something in return.”

The Heretic stills his hands and bows his head. The Wanderer gazes at her, her words percolating in his head. She feels ashamed, wiping the tear that spills from her eye quickly with her cuff.

“Do you weep… for her, or for yourself?” His voice is measured, and she hears a note of compassion chiming distantly within it.

“I don’t know,” she says, lost. “There are so many terrible things happening. I don’t know whom to weep for first.”

“I think,” the Wanderer says, swinging his great head around to look at the skeksis, “this conversation… warrants tea.”

“I suppose I’m the one making it then, am I?” barks the Heretic after a pointed silence. He gets up, creaking and rattling against the trinkets suspended above them, and hands the comb to Brea as he passes. “Here, see if your technique is acceptable.”

Brea looks at it more closely as the slap of the Heretic’s feet down the ramp fades. It’s made of bone, and the tines are very sharp. The handle has flowing whorls carved into it, not unlike the patterns the curling wrinkles make across the Wanderer’s nose.

“Do you want to try?” 

“I didn’t realise it was a serious request,” Brea admits. The Wanderer’s smile takes some time to reach both sides of his face.

“Sometimes distraction… eases the burden.”

Brea narrows her eyes, running her fingertip along the jabbing ends of the comb’s teeth. “And you get someone who knows how to braid out of the deal?”

“A reprieve… from one of _my_ burdens,” the Wanderer says, eyes darting down in the direction of the Heretic fussing with a kettle below. There is a fondness in his voice though, and Brea finds herself smiling back despite her still-damp eyes.

“Alright,” she says, getting to her feet. “I _do_ know a thing or two about hair.”

The comb is too big for her hands and she feels clumsy lifting it to the great curtain of silvery hair that cascades down over the Wanderer’s neck and shoulders – all four of them. When she parts and slides the comb into it, it cuts through the deluge like a whip through smoke. She thinks of the Heretic’s frenzied unknotting and glances at the tail-tuft and then down through the gaps in the gauzes. The Heretic’s head is bobbing, down to the firepit, up to a shelf in search of the tea leaves or the cups or who knows what.

“How does the Heretic have so much trouble with this?” she finds herself muttering.

“If only… I knew,” says the Wanderer. He reaches for his pipe again and begins to smoke. She must be getting used to it a little, Brea thinks, her eyes no longer blinking too-fast when the haze of the Wanderer’s potent exhalations mists around her. She focuses on the task at hand, parting and combing, parting and combing, fingers and comb slicing through the locks like a clipper through storm-waters off the Cifan coast.

“We had to sit for hours, my sisters and I, learning how to braid hair. Tavra somehow always got out of it – she was so good at it! She only learned quickly so she could spend her time doing something more fun. Riding landstriders, swordfighting.” She lifts a thick hank of hair and parts it into four. The comb she pins awkwardly between elbow and waist until one of the Wanderer’s hands hoves out from the uneven ends of his hair to hold it for her. She begins to braid, and it’s second-nature, she doesn’t even need to look as her fingers remember their hours of practise and work from muscle-memory. Instead, she meets the Wanderer’s eye, fingers passing the strands of hair over and under and over from left to right, pulled tight, down and down, to the tip. “Seladon took pleasure in my boredom of it. She was good too. She practised all the time and made me sit in front of the mirror in our mother’s chamber and copy her, again and again.” She rolls her eyes, then catches herself. “I’d do anything to be back in that moment. Bored, hating every minute. Ignorant. Happy.”

The mystic’s hair is uncanny, silky enough not to catch on the teeth of the comb, but it holds a braid as well as any Drenchen’s. Brea is envious – her own hair is smooth but her braids and the pins she must fasten them in place with ache at days’ end. They ache now, just another ache.

“I miss them,” she says, running her hand through the Wanderer’s mane as if he were some great beast of burden, but he isn’t and he pulls her out of the reverie, his head sweeping around to look at her with both eyes.

“Grief… is more often… than not… the price… of love.”

“Seladon said it was because of me the skeksis lords killed our mother. That I had poisoned her mind, made her lose all reason.” Brea’s voice sounds very small, and she can hear the tuneless humming of the Heretic as he waits for the water to boil over her words. “She feels so far away from me; I don’t understand why she still holds any regard at all for the lords, I mean, I don’t even know why I’m still calling them the lords. I – “ she sighs, hands dropping to her sides. 

“The folk-tales gelfling once told their children about the mystics were spun from the skeksis’ looms.”

It’s the longest thing the Wanderer has said to her in one go, and Brea cocks her head at him. He gestures to the cushion left vacant by the Heretic and she sits on it, waiting for him to continue. 

“The mystics would not harm any… wayward childlings. But the lighter halves were hidden… _are_ hidden… for a reason.”

Brea is thinking out loud. “If you are truly two halves of one whole, then what happens to one-“

“-affects the other.” The Wanderer dips his head and with one spare hand lifts up the edge of his hat, and with another parts the hair on the crown of his head to reveal to Brea a long since healed but deep and unsightly scar, warping the growth-pattern of his hair into an unnatural cowlick, now flattened against his forehead by his choice of headwear.

“The nail,” Brea whispers. Then, before she can stop herself: “Did it hurt terribly?”

“It… still hurts.”

“But it’s been…-” her eyes widen as she thinks back to the puppet show, “ _hundreds_ of trine!”

The Wanderer pulls his hat back into place. “And for hundreds of trine… hundreds upon hundreds… the mystics have been in seclusion, at the behest… of our other halves. Protected by… propaganda. Stories… to guide curious eyes in another direction.”

“If you get hurt they get hurt. If the gelfling work out what the skeksis have been doing, if we do rise up as one all they need to do is kill the mystics because you won’t fight back.”

“The Archer might,” the Wanderer says with a soft sigh of laughter, “but yes. You are right.”

“I didn’t think of this. Not that I wanted to kill anyone, but, if there is a rebellion, a _resistance_ , if to end skeksis rule they have to die too… I’m not sure I can live with that. The mystics are innocent.”

“Do I need to remind you… what the skeksis have been doing… to gelfling for these hundreds of trine?” The Wanderer’s gaze is different, intense suddenly as the importance of what he is saying becomes horrifyingly clear. “The mystics are not ignorant of it either, but what have they done… to stop them?”

“I don’t know,” says Brea quietly.

“Nothing.” His expression softens again, but there is an edge to it, a sharpness in his until-now half-lidded eyes. “Do not think… one is good… and the other… evil. It is much more… complex… than that.”

“But _you’ve_ helped us.”

“Before the vision… that would not have happened as it has.” He shifts position from crouch to sitting with legs crossed, tail thumping gently on the floor. “The goal… is unity.”

“Are gelfling a means to an end for you too, then?” Brea thinks of the dreamfasted memories, of gelfling tortured and drained for their living essence by the skeksis in the castle. 

“Not in so… cruel a manner. Ending skeksis rule… is in our interest too.”

“You can’t achieve unity if you’re constantly at odds with each other.”

“Or… distracted by… less singular desires.” 

Brea feels defeated; everything so much sadder with every moment passing. “I don’t know what the answer is then.”

“No-one does,” the Heretic says, and Brea starts; she had not heard him return. He’s at the top of the ramp with a tray – well, it’s a flat piece of wood, with two bowls and one small cup balanced on top of it. “It always comes down to logistics. You could go to the Valley of the Mystics and they would take you in, protect you in what ways they can, but can they take ten of you, a hundred? All gelfling? No. You must learn yourselves to fight, to rise up, to turn the tide. That is what I,” he gestures wildly between himself and the Wanderer, “can do to stop _them_.”

He approaches with the tea. The steam rising from all three mingles with the heady aroma of the hookah; the air is like incense, fragrant and calming. Brea takes the offered cup and sniffs it.

“Dried urdrupe leaves make for the best nightcaps,” the Heretic proclaims.

Brea recoils, all thoughts of the dubious moral standpoint of skeksis and mystics pushed to the back of her mind. It’s too big a thought for so late an hour. “Aren’t urdrupes _hallucinogenic_?”

“Oh, extremely!” The Heretic passes one of the bowls to the Wanderer, taking the second for himself and sitting in Brea’s former spot in front of them both. “You’ll be seeing sounds and tasting colours for days!”

“It is quite… the pastime.”

“But _only_ if you eat the berries. The leaves make for a very soothing tea.”

“If brewed… properly.”

“Don’t you start.” The Heretic’s nose is in his bowl but his eyes are fixed on the Wanderer’s. “You’re always starting.”

“You… never… _finish_.”

“Finish what?” But the Wanderer is drinking his tea. Brea sips hers; it is sweet and dark and its heat she can feel seeping into her extremities with each swallow. “Finish _what_?

“Complaining?” Brea clamps her hand over her mouth as soon as the word slips from it. The Wanderer’s eyes are wide, the Heretic staring at her in such shock she’s afraid he may drop his tea on her. “I- I didn’t mean-…!” But they are suddenly making strange noises: the Heretic howling with his head thrown back, the Wanderer’s low huffing, eyes closed, and she realises they are laughing and she gets no further with her apologies. 

Calming, the Heretic notices her handiwork and points with a clawed finger to the Wanderer’s hair. “Show me how you did this.”

“Oh, it’s easy, you just…” but she trails off seeing the subtle side to side of the Wanderer’s hand, hidden from the Heretic behind a cushion, slicing an invisible throat. _Change course_. “…you just watch what I do,” she finishes lamely, and doesn’t wait for the Wanderer’s approval or permission before setting aside her tea and teasing apart the braid she had worked on earlier. 

The Heretic’s gaze is unnerving, glued to her hands, then her face, then her hands, waiting for her to start. 

“Why don’t you work alongside me?” she suggests.

“It’s fine… by… me.”

“Well of course it is, this is all very nice for _you_.” The Heretic’s grumbles fade as he kneels beside Brea and takes up a similarly sized lock of the Wanderer’s hair in his hands. 

“Split it into four, like this,” she says, and the Heretic does so, and waits for the next instruction. Brea has to stop herself from laughing at her current situation; running from and on a quest to topple the skeksis and sitting here, in the middle of a desert, teaching one how to do the braids she learned at her mother’s knee. The Heretic is either a quick learner or was never that inept in the first place. Brea suspects the tugging at knots may have been somewhat of an act; there are many ways to show affection, winding the object of one’s endearment up being chief amongst them.

“When you were one being,” Brea says, “did you have a different name?” They are working on a five-strand plait together now, four hands making a simpler task of it. 

“Hmm, yes, of course,” says the Heretic, taking a strand of hair from Brea and passing her a different one, over and under. “GraGoh. Though, not much different if you think about it.” In between taking locks of hair to and from Brea, whichever spare hand the Heretic has at the time he occupies with stroking through the Wanderer’s unbound hair, along the underside of the his neck. The Wanderer, who would benefit from paying attention if he ever wanted another braid once Brea and her companions leave, appears to have dozed off.

Brea, watching the Heretic’s hands, has figured out her question. 

“If – _when_ you achieve unity, won’t you miss each other as you are now?”

The Heretic glances at the Wanderer’s sleeping face. “I’m not sure you understand what unity means to us.”

“Maybe I don’t. Maybe I never could.” She finishes the braid, and lets it fall back amongst its companions where it refuses to come undone. “You are one being in two bodies, I understand that. But as you are now, you care about each other, don’t you?”

“It is a little more than that.”

Brea frowns. “So, would there not be some part of GraGoh that remembers being two – just like you both remember being one, now, and misses it? Wishes to go back, just for a moment and see that face again? Embrace them? Hear their voice.” She stops, unable to see clearly through the tears smudging her vision. Her mother’s voice, telling her to muster herself, dry her eyes, hold up her head and straighten her wings.

Her mother’s arms and hands. Her perfume. Her face. 

The Heretic puts a hand gently on her shoulder and she doesn’t shrug it away. “It is difficult to put into words. UrGoh is me. I am urGoh. I will lose and gain myself. I will grieve and be joyful. The GraGoh to come is not the same as the GraGoh once before.”

“Is it a price worth paying?”

“I said before…” the Wanderer murmurs, “that grief… is the price of love.”

“It is worth paying, little one,” says the Heretic, but he is looking at the Wanderer, and the Wanderer, awake again, is looking at him. Brea feels all at once an intruder, some interloper inserting herself into a moment between these two otherworldly beings that is stitched through with some deep magic she can never even begin to unpick.

Then the spell breaks, and the Wanderer pins her with his cross-eyed gaze. “I roamed far from the valley… mourning the life I once had. But if the sundering had not happened… I never would have had… _this_.”

“The whole point,” the Heretic says, “is that pain is necessary for there to be joy. Shadow and sunlight. Your mother saw right in the end, yes? She would be proud of you, I’m sure, for continuing the fight. And you _must_.” 

“No matter… how high… the price.” 

“We are selfish,” says the Heretic, and Brea notes the first instance of his referring to them as two separate entities. “We have one goal.”

“But if we can… influence… others in reaching theirs…”

Brea wipes the tears from her cheek. “Then everyone wins.”

“If you can call it a win!” the Heretic snorts. “There will be dark days ahead, you can bet your braids on it.”

“And… at the end… light.”

Brea closes her eyes and sees the twisted light from the Crystal of Truth, blood-dark and corrupted, pulsing throughout the Dreamspace and into her waking thoughts moment after moment. 

“I hope that’s true.”

*

The tea must have worked; Brea remembers little else save the weight of her eyelids growing heavier and heavier until someone lifted her cup from her hands and drew a blanket over her shoulders. When she wakes, it’s still dark, but she can see she is in a little bed-space of her own amongst the cushions, and around her in a rudimentary ouroboros are the Wanderer and Heretic, sleeping with heads together and tails twitching now and again in whatever dream they are sharing.

She extricates herself, steps over them, slips between the curtains and makes her way back to the garden where the rest of her companions are only just beginning to stir.

“Where have you been?” Rian asks. He’s sitting up, yawning, dragging splayed fingers through his bed-hair in an attempt to tame it.

“I had questions.”

“Did they have any answers?”

Brea shrugs and smiles at him. “You know, I still know next to nothing about the mystics.”

“ _You know_ , that’s probably why they’re called _the mystics_.”

“I like your braid!” Deet, sunny, bright, so endlessly cheerful even at first light. She gestures with one hand to Brea’s shoulder at her puzzled look, shaking Hup awake with the other.

Confused, Brea twists her neck to look where Deet is pointing. The braid hanging over her shoulder isn’t one she remembers weaving; five strands, made with four hands, and twisted through it, a delicate lock of silver, uncanny hair.

There is pain behind her, and pain ahead, but beside her stand her allies; unlooked for, strange, a motley collection, but steadfast just the same. She lets the braid fall across her palm, closing her fist around it like the grasping of a lifeline.


End file.
